At a
workshop sponsored by the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club and the
Natural Resources Defense Council, Tom Hayden (former husband of Jane Fonda)
said that he hoped California would "lead other states down the path that will
ultimately lead to legislation that will eliminate all carcinogens and toxic
substances that the American people are subjected to."
[161] Progressive environmentalists know that if Hayden's goal were achieved, people would die of starvation. As a result, the progressives favor more sensible goals.

In
fact, the amount of man-made (rodent) carcinogens in a typical diet is trivial
when compared to the natural (rodent) carcinogens to which we are routinely
exposed.

There are more known carcinogens consumed by drinking a cupof coffee than
the amount of potentially carcinogenic pesticide residues the average person
eats in ayear.
[163]

The amount of carcinogens in the browned and burned foods we eat in a day
(carcinogens which are produced by cooking) is several hundred times greater
than the amount we inhale when we breathe severely polluted air. [164]

At
the microscopic level, nature is a virtual carcinogen factory. The plants in our
diet contain tens of thousands of natural pesticides to kill off fungi, insects
and predators. About 99.99 percent of the pesticides we eat are natural (10,000
times the level of synthetic pesticide residues) and half (27 of 52) of the
natural pesticides tested in rodents have proved to be carcinogenic at very high
dosage levels.

Yet,
although fruits and vegetables contain natural carcinogens, eating them is
necessary in order to combat cancer from other sources. Vitamin C and
other antioxidants, as well as folic acid and the other micronutrients found in
fruits and vegetables, are required as defenses against the carcinogenic
oxidants that are generated as part of the metabolism in all cells. Diets that
contain too few fruits and vegetables and too much fat create major health
risks. Ironically, any regulation that increases the price of fruits and
vegetables (such as pesticide regulations) are likely to decrease their
consumption and increase cancer rates! [165]

Isotopes of potassium, produced naturally in the body, expose us to natural
radiation.

Our normal metabolism produces byproducts (oxidants, such as hydrogen peroxide
and other reactive forms of oxygen) which are the same carcinogens produced by
radiation.

Many common metal salts naturally present in our bodies are rodent
carcinogens, including chromium, selenium and arsenic.

Arsenic is not only carcinogenic, it is a well-known deadly poison in large
quantities. Yet in small quantities it is apparently essential to life.

How important is the risk
of consuming carcinogens? An estimate of the relative risk from substances that
may cause cancer is presented in Table II. This table, taken from a survey
article by Bruce Ames and his colleagues, ranks possible cancer risks (based on
rodent experiments) with ordinary human exposure levels.
[167] In each case, the
risk has been normalized for comparison with ordinary tap water, which contains
a tiny amount of the carcinogen chloroform.

Note that all of the items
listed in Table II, in the quantities indicated, are believed to create a
trivial risk for human beings. The items are presented here only to help
establish perspective.

Not long ago, it was widely
believed that most foods we consumed and most chemical-containing products we
used were completely safe. That has changed, in part because scientists can now
detect trace elements of chemicals in amounts as small as one part per trillion.
Scientists can also test these chemicals on rodents in large doses. For example,
in one test on a decaffeinating agent for coffee, rodents were given the
equivalent of 12 million cups a day.
[168]

Of all known chemicals,
only a tiny handful have been tested. Of the chemicals tested so far (both
natural and synthetic), about half have proved to be carcinogenic at the high
dosage level used. Moreover, there is every reason to believe that further tests
will indict literally hundreds of thousands of additional synthetic and natural
chemicals as rodent carcinogens.

What do these results mean?
That's not clear. For example, about one-quarter of the tests that produced
cancer in mice failed to do so in rats, or vice versa. Since rats and mice are
biologically similar and both are dissimilar from humans, extrapolating to
statements about risks for people is a considerable leap. More importantly, it
is not clear what we can infer from high-dosage rodent- experiments about the
risk faced by humans exposed to low dosages.
[169] Many scientists think the
high-dose tests mainly show effects which are unique to high doses.

In general, the risks of
cancer from man-made chemicals are far smaller than one might gather from the
impassioned rhetoric of some reactionary environmentalists and sensationalist
news reports. A fundamental principle of toxicology is that "the dose makes the
poison." Substances such as vitamins and minerals which are essential to human
life in small doses are deadly in large doses. Also, what is a deadly poison to
one species may be quite safe for another, even in the same dosage
relative to body size. Rodents, for example, vary in their sensitivity to
certain toxins by a factor of many thousands.

Case Study. Putting
Cancer Risks in Perspective. How
important is the risk of consuming chemicals, which are carcinogenic for rodents
at very high doses, compared to other risks we face? Table III compares the
relative risk of a number of everyday activities, indicating for each how it
increases the probability of death by one in one million – a level often used by
federal and state governments in setting required levels of safety. As the table
shows:

The risk of getting
cancer by drinking tap water for a year is less than the risk of cancer from
increased exposure to cosmic radiation during two round-trip airline flights
between Los Angeles and New York City.

The risk of getting
cancer from the saccharin in 30 diet colas is equivalent to the risk of cancer
from living two months in Denver.

Virtually all of the
dietary cancer risks are trivial compared to the risk of driving to work each
day.

Table
IV presents a number of risks from occupational, sporting and other activities
from a different perspective. Combining it with Table 11, note that many
voluntary human activities such as hunting, boating and farming arc hundreds of
times more dangerous than consuming pesticides.

The scientific evidence
cited above is not secret. It is available to all, in the scientific literature.
Yet federal and state legislators often give little weight to these facts.
Instead, the outrage of citizens, uninformed about toxicology and swayed by
articulate rhetoric condemning each potential danger – usually without regard to
the problems of alternative courses of action – has led from the Love Canal
tragedy to the Superfund fiasco, and from largely phantom carcinogenic chemical
threats in California to the passage of Proposition 65.

Case Study: California's Proposition 65.
Drafted by the Environmental Defense Fund and the Sierra Club, introduced by Tom
Hayden, and backed by his former wife, Jane Fonda, and other Hollywood
celebrities, Proposition 65 is the most sweeping chemical regulatory law ever
enacted by a state government. Among other provisions, Proposition 65 requires
warnings for individuals exposed to chemicals "known" to cause cancer or
reproductive harm in rodents at very high doses. [170]

Those
accused of a failure to warn bear the burden of proving that a chemical exposure
did not put anyone at significant risk – a burden that is scientifically
impossible to meet. What Proposition 65 does is produce a lineup of suspects
doomed to remain just that – suspects. Lacking viable ways to prove their
innocence, businesses will tend to compound the problem by posting unnecessary
warnings. This has already happened in the housing industry, where many builders
post warnings on all new houses.

Yet
if everything is labeled, especially if all labels contain the same warning,
then warning labels lose their value. Warning labels affect behavior only if
consumers can distinguish the few, especially dangerous risks from the thousands
of minor risks they take every day. (See the accompanying chart.) The worst
feature of the California law, however, is the wording of the required warnings.
The statement, This product contains a chemical known to the state of
California to cause cancer, is very different from the statement,
There is one chance in 100,000 that a lifetime of consumption of this product
will cause cancer.

The
first statement is the warning Californians see. The second is the standard
California currently uses to decide whether a warning is required. The first
statement implies certain danger. The second implies a very low-probability
risk, based on hypothetical consumption patterns.

If
the goal is to convey useful information, a better warning would relate the risk
in question to risks associated with everyday activities. In most cases, the
risk of consuming a product is lower than the risk of driving to the store to
buy it.

Case Study: Why Safety Regulations Often Make Us Less Safe.
As regulators respond to the latest media blitz, or to uninformed public rage
about a specific chemical, no one should be surprised when the resulting new
regulations make the world less safe. Nor is this phenomenon confined to the
regulation of pollutants and food additives.

Out of a concern for
the environmental effects of fuel consumption, Congress has mandated Corporate
Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for U. S. automobile manufacturers.
Starting in 1989, U. S. automobiles had to average 26.5 miles per gallon.
However:
[171]

In order to comply with
CAFE standards, automakers are producing smaller cars, which are less safe for
occupants when accidents occur.

By one estimate, for the
1989 model year alone, the standards may have caused between 2,200 and 3,900
additional annual fatalities.

Over the next decade,
existing CAFE regulations may cause as many as 20,000 additional deaths, and
there are Congressional proposals to increase the the current standards by
more than 50 percent by the end of the decade.
[172]

The regulations of the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) are notori­ous for systematically depriving
Americans of lifesaving drug therapies in the name of safety. In a recent
episode:
[173]

The FDA delayed for two
years the sale of Streptokinase to treat heart attack victims, despite the
drug's potential to save 11,000 lives per year.

This foot-dragging by
the FDA may have cost as many as 22,000 lives.

In the area of
transportation, there has been mounting pressure to re-regulate airlines to
improve passenger safety. Yet not only has there been no noticeable increase in
fatalities among airline passengers since 1978, greater access to air travel has
substantially reduced the use of the automobile and, therefore, motor vehicle
accidents:
[174]

On the average, because
of airline deregulation there are 66,000 fewer automobile accident injuries
each year and 1,700 fewer deaths.

Overall, airline
deregulation has saved more lives each year on our highways than the total
number of lives lost in domestic airline crashes in the last 12 years.

Safety regulations often
make us less safe because politicians want to be seen as "doing something," and because action is often
believed to be better than inaction –
even if it turns out that the action was wrong:
[175]

As a result of the Clean
Air Act, many local power plants were required to build smokestacks 1,000 feet
or more in height in order to disperse the pollutants. Later, the government
maintained that this dispersal was contributing to acid rain.

After banning EDB as a
fumigant, the EPA approved the use of methyl bromide phosphine gas as an
alternative. Yet phosphine and methyl bromide are more poisonous and have
contributed to far more worker accidents than EDB.

Asbestos is virtually
harmless as long as it remains in walls and is not being dispersed as dust
that can be inhaled. Yet asbestos re­moval programs make asbestos dust
airborne and often create far more hazardous conditions than if it had been
left alone.

Because of safety fears,
the use of whooping cough vaccine has dropped in a number of countries. This
has resulted in outbreaks of the disease in Sweden, Britain and Japan – where
a whooping cough epidemic killed at least 40 children.

In the Silicon Valley,
the semiconductor industry was required to place storage tanks for solvents
underground as a safety measure in the 1960s. Yet this made leaks in tanks
more difficult to detect, and solvent residues are now showing up in drinking
water.

In the early 1970s, the
Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) required that children's sleepwear
be treated with the fire-retardant chemical TRIS. Later it was discovered that
TRIS is highly mutagenic and possibly also carcinogenic.

Not all safety regulations
make us less safe. But all too frequently regulators forbid one activity and
insist on another with no knowledge of the consequences. Small wonder these
regulations often do more harm than good. As noted above, regulation in the name
of health, safety and environmental protection also has made us less safe in
another way: it has lowered workplace productivity and workers' incomes.